THE DRINKS ARE ON CAMDEN
Bill Wigmore spends an evening with
con men and chancers who live off 'the social'
'I TELL yah, it's already in Archbold's!' Liam wears that look of smug triumph so familiar in the faces of the uneducated who have grasped a piece of arcane knowledge. He is Irish, slim, bald, in his late fifties, and has a large. black cowboy hat which tells you that some time in the Sixties he thought he was cool and would like you to think that he still is.
Liam is about to sue the Home Office, and expects to win a shedload of money. He has been told that I used to appear on television, so he paws my arm and looks into my eyes as he tries to engage my attention. Celebrity, even small-scale and long gone, is an irresistible magnet, so he explains earnestly about a plot flaw in EastEnders, and expects me to care.
Liam is also homosexual, which makes his hand-rubbing glee at his impending court case all the more galling. Five years ago, despite his obvious personal preferences, he contracted a marriage with an Oriental girl of 19. The Home Office deduced that this was not a real marriage, and impounded both their passports for some time.
Outraged, Liam contacted legal-aid
lawyers, who advised him that, under European law, his human rights had been infringed. This man may be gay, but at this moment, in a pub in Camden Town, he is the dominant male. The rest — builders, decorators, minicab drivers — are mere petty claimants. Liam, however, may be about to mine the mother lode, and, as such, he deserves and receives respect.
While Liam tries to charm me, my friend Colin, who brought me to this pub, is busy grafting at the same table. There are ten hooky car-tax licences to sell, and a scam involving cashing dodgy cheques. The other Liam, a sweet-natured HollywoodIrish grandfather, is probably going to go for this. House a £25,000 cheque in your account until it clears, and there's a £3,000 'drink' in it for you . . . minus, of course, £1,000 for my friend Colin.
Everyone at this table lives in a council flat. Everyone at this table has their rent paid by "the social'. Everyone at this table has a thick wodge of £10 notes that the tax man will never see.
The talk turns to the local gypsies, and to the clan chief who spent £65.000 on a headstone back in Ireland when his son was killed in a car crash in Oxford. There is real reverence and awe in their voices. This is a man who understands respect; a man of substance.
As the drinks circulate — lager and Guinness — the conversation turns to the firefighters' strike. Camp Liam comes over all solemn. 'Why don't we just give 'em the money?' he says, like he really cares. 'Because they're not worth it.' I say, provocatively. Three scallywags and a barmaid have a collective indrawing of breath. Political correctness is supposed to be a disease of the middle class, but the shibboleths of Camden's underbelly are just as fierce, prescriptive and irrational.
'Kiddies', no matter how unattractive or badly behaved, are sacrosanct. Nurses arc 'angels', paedophiles are 'scum', and policemen are 'filth'. Firemen, of course, are 'heroes'. 'For fuck's sake,' says camp Liam, 'we pay Tube drivers £30.000 a year! Surely firemen are worth more than that?' I try to explain that Tube drivers are over-paid and unnecessary, and that every rise given to people we approve of in the public sector leads to rises for people we are less keen on who also live off our taxes. This argument is met with blank incomprehension. No one at this table pays taxes — except me. Which is why the rest can indulge their red-top morality with such gusto. It doesn't cost them, and it makes them feel caring and good about themselves.
It's time for Colin and me to move on. Yesterday he was potless. He borrowed a termer. went to the pub and purchased a load of 'knock-off' shirts, on credit, for £15 each. Within an hour, he had sold them all for £20 each, and used the profit to buy cocaine. An hour later he had sold that (cheaply and fast) and returned to buy the remaining shirts at a wholesale price of £8 each. He still sold them for £20, pocketed a handsome profit and some more cocaine, this time for his own use.
He has a grin like a cheerfully malevolent frog, and is almost impossible to dislike. He's dyslexic, unschooled and has the fastest brain for mental arithmetic I have ever encountered. Colin is one of nature's entrepreneurs. His instincts are Tory, his contempt for 'the leaning tower of Camden' is bottomless, and he cheerfully takes them for every penny he can.
In a well-ordered society where only the very rich paid income tax and the so-called 'black economy' turned white, Colin would be a thriving, successful and above all respectable small businessman. In the real world, where the state picks our pocket with one hand in order to bribe us with subsidies with the other, where armies of 'public servants' batten on the productive economy to frustrate its operations, and where the jobs pages of the Guardian remind us daily of why there are never enough 'recourses' for the public goods we really care about, Colin the scallywag, and all his friends, are inevitable.
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